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Lydia Davis
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“... the translator, a lonely sort of acrobat, becomes confused in a labyrinth of paradox, or climbs a pyramid of dependent clauses and has to invent a way down from it in his own language.”
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“In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle — 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' — a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too ...”
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“The translator ... Peculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another form something already created, creating and not creating, writing words that are his own and not his own, writing a work not original to him, composing with utmost pains and without recognition of his pains or the fact that the composition really is his own.”
Lydia Davis, U.S. writer, translator
(1947)